Political scientist and media critic

January 22, 2009

False hype of Bush's 2004 victory

It's infuriating to me when political journalists lack the most basic understanding of quantitative data. For instance, I just heard a podcast of an NPR story about President Bush's political legacy in which Mara Liasson referred to "the president's decisive re-election victory in 2004." But as many people (including me) pointed out at the time, Bush's win was hardly "decisive." For instance, as Ron Brownstein noted, Bush's Electoral College margin was the second narrowest for an incumbent since the passage of the 12th Amendment -- only Woodrow Wilson got a lesser share of the available electoral votes.

Update 1/22 3:39 PM: In comments, David suggests that Bush's victory was decisive with respect to the popular vote, but that's not true either. As Brownstein points out, "Bush beat Kerry by just 2.9 percentage points: 51% to 48.1%. That's the smallest margin of victory for a reelected president since 1828."

Comments

There are (at least) 4 reasonable ways to measure the magnitude of a Presidential election victory: electoral vote, % of electoral vote, popular vote, and % of popular vote. Based on the latter two measures, Bush's victory was decisive. Brendan chose the measure that minimized Bush's victory margin.

Rob is correct. The phrasing is unclear, but I think Brownstein is using 1832 as the cutoff for the dawn of mass democracy in the Jacksonian era, not referring to 1828 as the closest incumbent reelection. This sentence from later in his article makes this more explicit: "Apart from Truman in 1948 (whose winning margin was 4.5 percentage points), every other president elected to a second term since 1832 has at least doubled Bush's margin over Kerry."

You are ready for the MSM; by choosing the standard as electoral at first and then "re-election margin" second, you are doing a great job manipulating some others.

Bush's 2004 victory was decisive; the issue was clear ... War Endurance or Effortful, and Merely Hopefully Honorable, Withdrawal. This was after WMD proved specious. Bush won by 3%; that is decisive and you know it; otherwise, why the games.

Also how about JFK substantively as the most Bush II like previous president? Like JFK, Bush II expanded aid for poor foreign countries; cut taxes on the rich (but unlike FDR Bush II made the USA tax system MORE progressive); and, far MORE agressively than Bush II, revanchistically, invaded foreign countries.

Also, the Iraq II War was not pre-emptive, but enforced the treaty from Iraq War I.